Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday September 13, 2011 @12:55PM
from the eighth-try-is-a-charm dept.

Barence writes "Microsoft has released the first full details of Windows 8, with an all-or-nothing approach to touchscreen technology. All versions of Windows 8 — whether used on a touchscreen device or not — will use the operating system's new Metro interface, which was first developed for Windows Phone 7 devices. The advent of Windows 8 sees Microsoft introduce a new style of application, dubbed Metro Style apps, and its own app store. The company also claims to have boosted Windows 8 performance with fast boot/shutdown times, a new Task Manager and the option to refresh a PC with a clean install of the OS with apps and settings left intact."

Its Windows with out windows...I see this as the rise of Linux on the Desktop, and the fact that Microsoft has decided the Desktop is no longer relevant.

After looking at this, it could be a serious competition to Apple iOS and Android. As they can make off the shelf Tablets and you have all your windows software ready to run on it. It could be a rebirth of Microsoft. Or it could backfire, Being that it is sacrificing its desktop share, for the tablet, where Android and iOS may have a sufficient market sha

the fact that Microsoft has decided the Desktop is no longer relevant.

I suggest people actually watch the keynote before running off at the mouth with uninformed comments. You can switch between the new "metro" interface and the standard desktop interface. Metro is an alternative to the desktop interface, it doesn't replace it. One is geared toward tablet like devices, the other toward desktop, but you have the choice to use either interface on either form factor. You can switch between the two seamlessly, and it appears to work surprisingly well.

Metro is an alternative to the desktop interface, it doesn't replace it.

When the OS boots up into a crappy phone interface which only gives you the option to switch to the desktop interface, and when the desktop start menu apparently switches you back to the crappy phone interface, that's a pretty damn good sign that Microsoft are abandoning the desktop.

When they're demoing the mobile interface, but then reveal that you can switch to a real desktop mode, they've gone a step farther than any other mobile OS has so far. I can't tell you how sick I am of Android not having easy task management or windowing.
Assuming they maintain their API (which they will) and release an appropriate toolchain (which they will, with free tools too) then recompiling windows programs to target mobile devices will now be possible. Whereas in iOS or Android, almost everything ha

Have you seen the early reviews [thisismynext.com] for the Windows 8 tablets? The fact that there is a fan and exhaust port blows my mind. They need to be launching with tablet hardware significantly better than the iPad. The iPad specs for weight, durability, and battery life should be the minimum for what they are willing to launch with.

which should be the next good version, and if MS keeps to their historic release schedule, we should see sometime in 2014 to 2015. Not that long to wait really, since I'm sure Windows 7, which I find to be excellent, will tide me over while I wait.

It's even easier than that (assuming you're talking about installing the OS yourself).

I used to work at a software dev company that didn't officially support windows7 or any 64-bit version of windows really (They eventually managed to patch up their crappy software to work with win7 at least, although they still don't support 64-bit OSes last I checked). Because of this, they still recommended XP to everybody who called in asking what to purchase. Our standard response was "Call up dell, ask them to put XP

Fortunately, the guys I get my OS from keep regular backups on a public server, so I can re-download them anytime.

If your OS vendor doesn't do that, they are most likely using an external service for the same purpose. I can't remember the service's exact name, but their site has a ship with black sails on the front page.

I find Windows 7 to be a better overall computing experience than XP, Vista, and Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.04, which were the 4 operating systems I had running across various systems at the time I tried out 7. I made 7 one of my dual boot options on my primary system not long after that, and recently I reformatted the HD as I wanted to reclaim the full space into a single partition as I found I was only booting into the other OS about once every few months.

Oh I can certainly drop to terminal window when I need to, and I did with ubuntu. a lot. a whole lot.

That's part of what I didn't like about ubuntu, that I had to dick around with a lot of stuff on a nitty gritty level to get it working. It reminded me sometimes of the old days manually editing config.sys to get IRQs and DMA channels playing nicely between different hardware. To be fair, Ubuntu wrapped a whole lot into gui, a far and away better experience than when I first tried slackware in 1995, but ubun

Is there something wrong with the old man who doesn't use the new stuff? Is the new stuff actually better or merely new? Are the old apps inferior or merely old? If you think old stuff is awful then stop using them but don't bash your elders over it. And why are you using an ancient technology like slashdot anyway (I hope you're not using an archaic computer designed many months ago and are only using hip new tablets or phones to post).

But XP and Windows 7 UI still feel like a step back in some ways. I want SMALLER UI elements and they keep getting larger. The OS keeps trying to get into the foreground instead of being unnoticed in the background.

LOL! Not what I meant exactly. I spend a significant amount of time helping others, I get much satisfaction from it.

What I meant was, life is too short to spend it swearing at viruses &etc. that I don't know how to fix. The only help I am qualified to offer now is to install Linux for them. If that's what they want.

The Zune was a decent device, as good or better than its competition at the time. It was just a huge failure of marketing. Reminds me a bit of some of the Android tablets going against Apple right now, actually.

Seems like the Windows/Star Trek "every other release" rule is still in play. This user interface will be horrible on the business desktop for people who actually want to get real work done. I wonder how many businesses will avoid Windows 8 and wait for 9 to come out?

Seeing as I'm not at the keynote, I have to go by the article. The article says "I used it. it's horrible." I have nothing other to gauge an opinion on at this time. Perhaps the author was using an earlier release than what's currently onstage.

I'm at the keynote watching him demonstrate it RIGHT NOW. It works wonderfully.

Educate yourself./accused of being a microsoft shill in 3... 2... 1...//ah, predictable.

Given that you're reading Slashdot while at the keynote, I have a hard time believing you're paying enough attention to notice any delays, glitches, or other annoyances that might occur during the presentation.

There is a button to go to the desktop, but I doubt they will let you turn off the Metro UI completely. Microsoft is essentially using windows 8 to force their way into the mobile market. If every user is suddenly familiar with the windows phone UI, and all of their applications suddenly work seamlessly with their desktop and the windows phone OS, then maybe that windows phone starts to look that much better.

It is actually a rather brilliant move (not that I endorse it in any way) by Microsoft to leverage

Quote from link: "Every screen needs to be touch. A monitor without touch feels dead."

Response: Like everything developed by every company that wants to have mass market sales, it's humorous to NOT hear "It's what we've noticed as something very popular with other types of [technology] that eats up peoples' time and develops even further interest in buying. Mystery and slow revelation with additional hidden secrets is the key to fast up-front sales. We'll jump on the bandwagon, but it's something completely different from the norm! Buy it and you'll find out how!"

Honesty is too painful to just throw out there, I guess.:)

Not troll material or flamebait at all - It's just something I see constantly and I find it humorous. I may love Windows 8, I may hate it. Don't know until I use it.

Windows XP lasted (past tense may not be accurate, but oh well) as long as they needed it to. It's not like XP suddenly will 'stop working' no matter what MS wants. So a hypothetical MS OS flop just means they fix it for 9 and the world largely pretends 8 doesn't exist and MS will roll with that so long as it prevents other desktop OSes.

By lasted I meant security patches and driver support.Even 1-2 year old laptops seem to have Windows XP driver support.Though I agree that its more of a decision on the Laptop manufacturer than Microsoft, but the market support is there.

Vista didn't fuck up bad enough to make it 'The Year of the Linux Desktop', nothing is going to.

Until Linux gets some polish it will continue to be nothing but a sock puppet for political fanatics like Stallman and self serving 'developers' who can't be bothered with finishing features they start.

Microsoft insists that the touch-oriented interface is suitable for any device, regardless of whether it has a touchscreen or not. "We envision an OS that scales from small form-factor, keyboardless tablets, all the way up to servers," said Windows president Steven Sinofsky, at a special press preview of the new operating system.

What's more, the company believes that every device should have a touchcreen. "The UI is the same UI, whether you use a mouse, keyboard or touch," said Jensen Harris, director of program management for the Windows Experience. "Every screen needs to be touch. A monitor without touch feels dead."

I, for one, don't want a server with this "Metro" interface and a touchscreen. I look forward to Windows 9, once Windows 8 is out of beta.

This "Metro" Interface reminds me of the old IBM PS/1 machines back in the early 1990s. It had four huge buttons that you clicked on, usually you clicked the one that booted to DOS and went from there. This interface was a flop.

Will MS screw up with this UI. Iffish, and time will tell. MS has been decent with new UIs, especially Windows 95 which pretty much set the standard for what people expect on a machine. Before that, it was clicking on a program manager, NeXT dock, or having your applications in

My first reaction is highly negative, but digging into it further, it doesn't look that bad. It'll bring up an icon display, you click 'explorer', and you're back at the standard mouse/keyboard windows UI. So my response is tempered to just slightly negative, in that there'll be one extra step during bootup.

I'm sure it will be able to be configured to go straight into Explorer, and that's what everybody who runs 8 on a desktop will do.

I only looked at the first link but the first thing that jumped out at me was:

The advent of Windows 8 sees Microsoft introduce a new style of application, dubbed Metro Style apps, and its own app Store. The Metro Style apps are run in full-screen mode, with no Windows taskbar or other menu items getting in the way.

"Every single pixel of your beautiful screen is for your app," said Harris. "You're just immersed in the content."

You heard of the app store first probably with some Linux distribution in the 1990s. You heard of full screen mode before you ever heard of any alternative, with nearly every post-dumbterm but pre-windowed platform (e.g. MS-DOS, C64, etc) since fullscreen was all they had.

You miss his point entirely - his point was not that Apple invented those concepts by any stretch of the imagination (hell, Classic and OS X were about as *far* from fullscreen as you could be in an OS), but that they released a new version of OS X very recently with those two features as key selling points.

Very coincidental, I think?

Either way it's a bit of a no brainer - it's Apple's attempt to streamline desktop computing to make it easy enough for anyone to use and there are a lot more users who want th

Why the fuck would we want that on a desktop? Part of what makes a desktop system so useful is having multiple things open that you can switch between, position around, and so on. Right now I have my browser up on top of my primary window, but my e-mail client hiding behind it. I can see when new mail comes in. On my secondary monitor is the interface for our digital security system so I can watch over the cameras. There are a few other things loaded and running, but the windows are occluded at the moment. I don't want to be "immersed" in any of this shit. The ability to have multiple things going is why I like my desktop, it's why I have 4 cores, 8GB of memory and north of 4 million pixels of total display.

I do not get this obsession with trying to make computers work like phones. No, bad idea. When I heard of what they were doing with Lion I said "What a horrible idea." Now MS is doing the same? What the fuck? How about you give me a phone interface on a phone and a computer interface on a computer?

I do not get this obsession with trying to make computers work like phones. No, bad idea. When I heard of what they were doing with Lion I said "What a horrible idea." Now MS is doing the same? What the fuck?

Must confess I'm using Lion myself and I'm not particularly convinced. Fullscreen works well when the app designer has thought about how their application will function in fullscreen. (Safari is OK, NeoOffice in its infinite wisdom thinks that when I say fullscreen, I mean "so full I can't easily change any formatting without switching out of fullscreen mode"). There's a number of other glitches that I won't go into or we'll be here all evening.

It's very simple - not everyone (in fact, I'd imagine that the vast majority of computer users) are like us, which is why the "Full Screen Richness" is optional. On Lion a full screen app doesn't have to be run that way.

They have some tweaking to do (scrollbars really need their arrows back), but they have added an interface that makes the computer easier to use for dedicated tasks, and a way to easily get to them and swap between them.

You're not forced to use it that way, but the option is there because no

They are indeed mimicking Apple. And making the same mistakes, in my opinion.

"Every single pixel of your beautiful screen is for your app," said Harris. "You're just immersed in the content."

As I said [slashdot.org] when OS X Lion was released, I think this push towards full-screen apps is a move backwards. Yes, having the app fill the screen makes a lot of sense for smartphones and tablets, where screen/interface space is limited and you're typically focusing on a single task at a time. But on a desktop?

The whole point of a multi-purpose desktop computer is to be able to do a myriad of things, and more importantly to combine all the various resources/applications together in powerful ways. I want to be able to have a web-page reference document open while I code something, or copy-and-paste something from a spreadsheet into a text document. I want to be able to cross-compare multiple graphs/images/whatever at the same time. To do all this, I need to be able to tile, stack, and move windows on my screen. Endless alt-tabbing just doesn't cut it.

With desktop monitors getting bigger and bigger, fullscreen apps just don't make sense. Even maximized apps don't make sense: your mouse has to travel ridiculously far to get from content to controls if you make your app fullscreen on a 30-inch monitor. (There are of course times when you want a single app fullscreen; e.g. photo editing on a large monitor gives you a much better view of the content.) One of the main advantages of modern large monitors is the ability to have multiple apps open at once, without them blocking each other or being ridiculously constrained. Why are we throwing away these advantages?

I'm fully aware of the cognitive science research on multi-tasking (specifically, that people are bad at it and that focusing on a single task for a longer period of time has big advantages). What I'm questioning is whether any non-trivial task can really be accomplished using a single application. We should be optimizing our user interfaces to maximize the efficiency and focus on tasks and workflows: not boxing ourselves into stripped-down full-screen apps.

I agree that for some desktop applications (like web browsing) it's useless. However for some other applications like content creation (movie or photo editing) or consuming (video playback, video chat with presentations) it is nicer to have a full screen available as in your random video game so you're not distracted by your e-mail counter or other random things that happen.

As you said, multitasking is hard and it's sometimes nicer to even work on a document or e-mail and simply have some type of solid, dar

I want to be able to have a web-page reference document open while I code something, or copy-and-paste something from a spreadsheet into a text document. I want to be able to cross-compare multiple graphs/images/whatever at the same time. To do all this, I need to be able to tile, stack, and move windows on my screen. Endless alt-tabbing just doesn't cut it.

Note that Win8, unlike iOS or Android, actually lets you run Metro apps side by side. You do it by using the swipe-from-left-edge gesture, but instead of releasing the finger, you keep it down and drag the app thumbnail onto the edge.

It's somewhat limited in that you can only handle two of them that way, and you always have one smaller window docked alongside one bigger one. On the other hand, the apps are expected to be aware of this mode, and adapt their UI to the situation when they're docked as "small w

Why does it have to be either or? People get so worried that everything is changing. It has been one way for ages and now there are other ways. I agree that it is cool, useful and necessary to have your apps all on screen and available, but there are definitely times when it is nice to have the option to work full screen - video editing, for example - something where you are engrossed in one thing and you don't want or need to see the clutter of the desktop and the other windows.

Only for us who know better. Unfortunately, we are not the target market, anymore. All I see all day at work is people swishing their middle fingers around on their smartphones, and they seem to love all this stuff.

From Firefox to Unity to Aero to Chrome to Ribbon to iAnything, everything released within the last 6 years has driven me nuts. I'm really trying to give this stuff a chance, but I just hate everything I come across. It was the obscure error messages and badly designed menus that confused people, not the taskbars, status bars, and maximize gadgets.

What really frightens me is that the Linux community is heading in this direction, too. WTF?

Well, there's a couple of reasons: I keep a row of icons for frequently used apps on the left side of my desktop, I like instant (well, as "instant" as they can be) access to them, so I prefer them visible (in addition to the quick launch bar.. I have a lot of shortcuts!)
I've also noticed a little, infrequent bug where sometimes the taskbar button for a loaded app vanishes, usually Firefox for some reason.
There's always the "Alt-Tab" combo, but honestly it just doesn't really appeal to me as a primary

Just think about it... Microsoft has probably made the biggest improvement to their software in two decades... You can now reboot far faster than ever before! Just think about the time saved per week for your average Windows user!

If it really does work across Intel, ARM, tablet and desktop as seamlessly as the demos show, then I'm sold. I like the low memory usage on older systems and Metro will be a barrel of laughs. Downloading the public developer code when it goes live today (http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/microsofts-build-conference-windows-8-blowout-bldwin-012681.php)

Well, the real issue with this is that, in my experience, the apps and settings are the problem, not Windows itself (depending upon whether you consider the registry to be part of the OS or the user settings). I've found that often times nuking the user profile (which is the most obnoxious part to lose) is what solves the problem, not that Windows binaries are corrupted.

The full-screen Metro Style apps are likely to be web apps; the kind you would typically expect to find on a tablet. Things such as Twitter clients, video players and news readers, rather than full-blown desktop software such as Office or Photoshop.

Although they can be coded in conventional programming languages such as C and C++, they can also be created using standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript (but not, rather controversially, Microsoft’s own Silverlight). An

Many people simply don't believe MS is able to deliver. Trotting out a prototype/development tablet with a fan doesn't inspire a lot of hope. Are they really that far behind that they're still not running on their target CPU architecture, yet?